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Annejet van der Zijl’s “Sonny Boy” on the Big Screen
Dutch theaters are preparing for the film version of Annejet van der Zijl’s 2004 book
Sonny Boy. The film will screen for the first time on January 27, 2011. The making of the film has been avidly followed in the media, and the coming months will see a variety of pre-screening events in preparation for its premiere. Based on a true story,
Sonny Boy is the reconstruction of a forbidden love against the backdrop of the 1920s.
See the following description with a link to the original below:
“Sonny Boy,” the title of an Al Jolson song from 1928, was the nickname given to Waldemar Nods and Rika van der Lans’ little boy. 1928 was the year their impossible love began, a love they kept alive against all the odds. The contrast could not have been greater: Waldemar was a serious-minded black student from Paramaribo in Surinam, not yet twenty, son of a gold prospector and grandson of a woman who had yet to free herself from the chains of slavery; Rika was the daughter of a Catholic potato wholesaler, warm-hearted and obstinate, a married mother of four, approaching forty when they met. She was his landlady. When he moved in she had only just left her husband and was penniless, living with her children in a tiny rented apartment in The Hague.